


Chanel

by scioscribe



Category: Clouds of Sils Maria (2014)
Genre: F/F, Missing Scene, Older Woman/Younger Woman, Power Dynamics, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-08-27 20:37:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8415865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: “You should try to think that someone might like to see Helena in you,” Valentine said.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [disgruntled_owl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/disgruntled_owl/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide!

“It’s a hazard of how I made my name,” Maria said once, and she shouldn’t have: it was during an interview and the reporter, a young woman with a bubblegum pink iPhone poised on the table between them recording it all, had leaned forward when she had said it.

She might have known then that she was making a mistake. But the impulse to be stupid had its own allure, the way the fish must like how the hook gleams in the dark of the water.

“They come to me, you know, these women, because they think I understand them. And of course I do, I do! Desire, you know, it’s all the same, it’s all a spectrum, and as an artist—as an _artist_ ,” she said, laughing, this time sketching quotation marks in the air to show that she had a sense of humor, “it’s my responsibility to see and to show every color in that spectrum if I’m asked to. The prism of human emotion, throwing off infinite light. But these women, they mistake it for something else.”

“It’s an unusual price to pay for stardom, the unwanted attentions of other women.” The screen of the reporter’s phone tallied up the minutes of their conversation: sixty-seven of them, long enough that Maria had grown discursive and careless, especially with the taste of champagne still in her mouth.

“Well,” Maria said, “I wouldn’t say they are entirely unwanted.”

She wasn’t thinking: she was just examining the ankle strap on her shoe, fidgeting with it until she could kick herself free. Then she was barefooted against the carpet, stretching, flexing her arch.

“That feels so much better,” she said.

* * *

She never escaped that article, though she tried, from time to time, to be coyly philosophical about it, to say that in any case she would never have escaped _Maloja Snake_ itself: everywhere she went, she would run into women who saw Sigrid in her. In a way, she would say in her later and more cautious interviews, it kept her young.

Until, of course, it didn’t.

“You should try to think that someone might like to see Helena in you,” Valentine said. She was breaking apart garlic cloves and mincing them with a razor blade, Scotch tape on her fingers to keep her from cutting herself. The smell seemed to be soaking into the wood of the table and Maria felt she should have objected on Rosa’s behalf, but she couldn’t take her eyes off Val’s hands, how quick and ruthless and refined they were. “Sigrid responds to Helena, even if she doesn’t want to.”

“Sigrid leaves her.”

Val shrugged. “Relationships end. Sigrid uses her—to advance, to feel her own power—but Sigrid is eighteen and beautiful, she’s been wanted before, she’s been desired before. She could have climbed other ladders, but Helena’s is the one she chose.”

“You’ll say anything to try to make me love her,” Maria said. “Sometimes I think you’re on Klaus’s payroll instead of mine.”

“You don’t have to believe me.” Her hands moved faster. “But desire isn’t unilateral.”

“Sigrid was the icon.”

“Sigrid was the icon because Sigrid looked like you." She brushed the garlic into the oil in the saucepan and made a face. “My hands are going to smell like this for days. --Sigrid was a part. You were what people were looking at, you were who they came to see.” She stripped the tape from her fingers and tossed the strips into the bin. “You’ll find that with Helena, too. Some women prefer that.”

“It’s all irrelevant anyway, of course, it’s not the real issue.” She turned the knob on the stove and the gas clicked on and poured blue flame up against the bottom of the pan. “In some ways it will be better to leave all of that behind. I always felt like such a disappointment to them, having to explain that I wasn’t interested.”

Val scoffed.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Maria said, swatting at her with a dishtowel.

“It means I bet you loved it. The gracious decline—knowing how beautiful they thought you were, knowing they wanted you enough to come over and ask about it, to make themselves vulnerable like that. Getting to turn them down. You got off on it with Henrik and I’d bet anything you got off on it then, too.”

“No, no, you’ve got it all wrong, not getting off on it was the crux of the whole thing,” Maria said, and she was rewarded with Val’s laugh, warm and almost scratchy, with the intimacy of vinyl. It was Valentine she would think of, all those months later, when a young man talked to her about timelessness, about women who seemed to come from outside of any era. But that was silly. Valentine had a birthday—Maria had bought her flowers for it, flowers and a man’s watch, a secondhand Omega that had still tipped over a thousand dollars. Val had a family—Maria had met them.

Valentine had a favorite film of Maria’s, and it wasn’t _Maloja Snake_.

Valentine had a favorite actress, and she wasn’t Maria Enders.

The consolation was that Val sometimes lied to her. She had no proof of that, but she believed it nonetheless—she could sometimes feel Val not saying certain things. Committing, at the very least, lies of omission.

She really could still smell the garlic on Val’s hands.

“The gracious decline,” she said.

Val looked up from stirring. “Sorry?”

“You said I must have loved the gracious decline. Being on the decline myself now—”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Valentine said. She poured the frozen peas into the oil and garlic; Maria remembered just then that they had argued about that, about whether or not it would be better to buy fresh. Val had said it would make no difference. “You’re deliberately misconstruing what I’m saying not five minutes after you obviously did understand it.” She wiped her palms against her apron. “Maybe it’s not the best thing for us to talk about.”

“I’m here to study the part. It’s the only thing to talk about.”

“I can’t do this job 24/7,” Val said.

“It’s only conversation.”

“Fine. Okay.” She stirred. “Can you get the pasta on?”

Maria measured out spaghetti, the stiff strands of it dry against her palm, one fistful for each of them. She thought of things to say and knew it would have been a bad idea to say most of them. Val had offered to quit just three days before and now every disagreement felt like a guillotine blade being hoisted up.

To her surprise, Val broke the silence first. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“Nothing. You’re—you’re right, I was twisting what you said. It doesn’t matter.”

“You want me to say that I’ve never felt this way before?”

The steam was coming off the boiling water and off the simmering sauce: sweat prickled on the nape of Maria’s neck. She had preferred her hair longer than this—she had liked the shield of it—but Helena had always had that butch cut and she had wanted to ease into it. It had been Valentine’s advice for her to ease into it, Valentine who had sat beside her in the empty, off-hours salon, smiling at the sound of the scissors.

“Because I have,” Val said. “It’s not breaking news. Are you telling me it is for you? You played Sigrid and you never thought about it? All those girls, and you never once? I read that interview you did.”

Maria knew without asking which interview she was talking about. “It elided complexities.”

“That’s your answer for everything. That there’s something I’m missing, something the rest of us are missing, something only you understand.”

Maria turned off the burner and then Val did too, with a hard snap of her wrist that threatened, for a moment, to break the knob right off, to wreck the house Rosa had left for them.

“You’re the one who keeps saying I’m missing the point of Helena,” Maria said. “Missing her completely. You’re turning the play inside-out to get it to say what you want to say.”

Val crossed her arms. “What is it you think I want it to say?”

“That Helena is—is me. That I’m Helena. That somehow she would be a worthwhile person to embody, only because you want—” She felt like she was opening some wound, as though she had been asked to lift her shirt and show an appendectomy scar, a mark where something had been taken out of her. “It doesn’t matter. Perhaps you’re right, and we shouldn’t talk about it, not during dinner. I’m keeping you on the clock too much.”

“On the clock?”

She clicked both burners on, one after the other, and let the heat build up again. “I’m respectful of your input,” she said, aware of how much it sounded like a canned line from some personnel appraisal, something that Helena would have filled out for Sigrid. “And that interview was a long time ago.” She believed that when she said it, until she remembered the iPhone that had recorded it all. An old model, though, she thought. And time got away so quickly—that could have been 2007, 2008.

Valentine would have been in high school, then, or maybe just in college. That gulf. Helena had drowned in it, for Sigrid’s sake, but like Maria kept saying, she wasn’t Helena.

They ate dinner in virtual silence until, with almost nothing left on her plate but a thin sheen of oil, Val talked about a documentary she had seen on garlic. “Les Blank,” she said. “ _Garlic is As Good as Ten Mothers_. Blank, he understood food, he understood people. The garlic festival—he visits it, Alice Waters is there, all these people. Werner Herzog even, I think. They talked about how people kept demanding more and more garlic in the dishes. That’s what they came there for, and they wanted as much of it as they could stand.”

“To gorge oneself,” Maria said. “It’s very American.”

“I don’t think so,” Val said, because all they had done in Sils Maria was disagree, when before Val had fit into her life as neatly as a toothbrush into a carrying case, a key onto a keychain. “What you’re talking about is living like there are no consequences, like you can do whatever you want because you’re going to live forever, because you’re invincible.”

“Like one of your superheroes.”

But Val refused to be deterred. “But this is saying—time is limited. We have to get the most out of what we have, because sooner or later, the color will fade out. We’ll have to go back to normal. To weaker flavors. Like every experience of joy is predicated on knowing that it can’t last, that it was always too temporary and too unstable to last. So they take it, even if it burns their tongues. I think that’s brave.”

“Brave like Jo-Ann,” Maria said, to spite her.

Val met her gaze levelly. “Sure,” she said. “Brave like Jo-Ann.” She stood up, her chair scraping across the floor, and went in to do the dishes. Maria, watching her, thought that the soap and the heat would scrub the smell from her skin, would make her seem like someone who had never hungered. There was a moment, when Val turned to put a pot in the dish rack, when she seemed like she was trying to look behind her, to see Maria, to see what expression she would have on her face.

Maria judged her for it. When she had played Sigrid, she had never looked back.

But she supposed Val would have an answer for that, too—that she was really playing Lot’s wife, that the pillar of salt would match the garlic, would scorch, would overwhelm. That she was in favor of that.

In truth, Maria didn’t remember what she had been thinking the night of the interview, when she had said nothing and implied little, but the echo chamber of the press had caught it all nonetheless—had caught it and kept it even for her. She hadn’t known Val then, of course.

But yes, there had been some things she had known. Valentine’s surprises for her were all elsewhere.

She put on _Cloud Phenomena of Maloja_ and watched the snake sweep in, languorous, eternal, uncaring, incidental: something that had always been there finding a route for just a moment and so becoming something else. When Valentine came into the room, Maria was relieved that she still carried the scent of garlic with her. She held up her hand and Val came over and took it—the way, Maria thought, the canyon took the cloud.

Val’s hands were strong, tanned; her left pinky finger just slightly crooked from closing it in a door once.

She felt a peculiar, heady combination of boldness and delicacy—flushed almost to the point of drunkenness with knowing that Val was stronger than she was, younger than she was, and yet Val was standing there caught by her, drawn to her, the fish to the hook once again. All she had to do was say yes and she could have this. And she thought of the interview, of finally slipping her foot free of her shoe, of feeling the lush pile of the carpet beneath her toes.

“Tell me,” she said, looking up at Val, luxuriating in how she looked to Val, “that you’ve never felt this way before. This way exactly.”

Val’s lips parted. Maria could hear the hitch in her breath: Val wondering how much she could afford to give up and give away. Then she said, “I’ve never felt this way before,” and she straddled Maria, poised the warmth of her body just a fraction above Maria’s own, her hands rigid against the back of the sofa as if to hold herself away. Push-and-pull, Maria thought, almost amused by the immaturity of it. She traced a straight line up Val’s throat and Val shook her off.

“Don’t do that,” she said. “It makes me feel like I can’t breathe.” Her voice was harsh. Maria didn’t know if it was true or if Val simply wanted to deny her something.

“What about here?” She drew her thumb across Val’s collarbone. Val’s hair was spilling down around her shoulders and when Maria encountered a strand, she wound it around her fingers, scaling upwards until she reached Val’s cheek, her jaw.

“There is fine,” Val said, and kissed her.

It had been years since Maria had done this. She had forgotten how full Val’s lips would be, how soft from drugstore chapstick, cheap things she bought and shoved into her pockets even as Maria gave her Chanel. The scent of garlic and oil and department store perfume on the insides of Val’s wrists, on her neck, when Maria gave her Shalini at nine hundred dollars a bottle. As if Val were drawing lines on her body, her life, her time—that she would be Maria’s, but only so far. That she would belong to her, but only so much. But, but, she thought, sliding her hand under Val’s T-shirt, running her palm up the slight softness of Val’s belly, Sigrid came to Helena. Helena sat behind her desk and Sigrid came to her.

The midpoint of Val’s bra was some kind of squashed rose made out of netting and that struck Maria as funny to the point where she laughed and then Val grinned at her, her smile the brightest thing in the semi-dark of the room, her face lit up by the shadows and white light of the snake crawling on the TV screen behind her.

“Oh, shut up,” she said, stripping off her shirt and unhooking her bra.

She had always stayed at least partly clothed when they’d swum and Maria took a moment to appreciate her before she kissed all that new skin, before she ran her hands up and down the uninterrupted smoothness of Val’s bare back. She circled her tongue around one nipple and Val made some thick, unintelligible sound in her throat.

“Fair’s fair.” Her breathing was hard again. “You always wanted me to see you. You always took everything off.  I want to see you now, too.”

“I didn’t know you were looking,” Maria said, but she unbuttoned her shirt and let Val push it down her shoulders.

“Bullshit. You always knew.”

She thought of the first time they had met. But Valentine had never looked at her the way all those women infatuated with Sigrid had.

Still, though. “I knew.” She closed her eyes and let Val touch her, brush callused fingers still slightly sticky from tape against her navel, against her breasts. “You looked at me—like you look at the cliffside. Like I’m dangerous.”

“Like I could fall,” Val said. She slid off Maria and then pulled her up and into the bedroom, into Val’s bedroom with the smell of Val on the sheets, with the occasional strand of long dark hair on the pillows. She knelt down and unbuttoned Maria’s jeans; rolled her underwear down, too, until Maria stepped out of both.

“There you are.”

“You’ve seen me before.”

“Not like this. Not in the dark.” She kissed the inside of Maria’s thigh, her temple laid flat against the sudden hot throb in Maria’s cunt. She seemed to know the way it hit her, the way that faint pressure teased, because she kept on, lips soft but elsewhere. Then she drew back. “I like you in the dark.”

“I like you on your knees,” Maria said.

Val smiled up at her again. “There you go.”

“But take off the rest of your clothes.”

Val stood briefly and stripped off her jeans. The boy-cut briefs she wore. She left her socks on—they were thick, woolen, oatmeal-colored—and it made Maria want to peel them down, to kiss Val’s white exposed ankles and the blue veins on the tops of her feet. But she did not want it badly enough to stop Val from kneeling again and that was what she wanted most of all—to be wanted more than she herself wanted. To have this girl on her knees.

To feel the way the snake felt as it passed through the mountains, ruthless and smooth, something frozen made mobile again, something brought back down to earth and earthiness, to be looked at, to be _marveled_ at. To be the only thing there was. As if everyone else had disappeared.


End file.
